The subject matter disclosed herein relates generally to the high throughput isolation of biological materials. Recent developments in the life sciences including cell therapy and diagnostic techniques based on the prevalence of biomolecules and cells in a sample have made it increasingly more important to be able to rapidly and efficiently isolate these materials from a sample without unduly compromising the integrity of these materials. Such materials have been isolated using either non-immunological or immunological means. The former approach has relied upon physical properties of the materials such as size, shape, density and charge. While this approach has yielded fast and simple isolation techniques they have lacked the desired specificity, especially in the case of cells. The latter approach, which involves attaching some sort of label to the biological material using specific recognition factors like antibodies, receptors or receptor ligands, may provide a high degree of specificity but to date has not provided the desired throughputs with minimal damage to the materials being isolated. Fluorescent Activated Cell Sorting (FACS), a specialized type of flow cytometry, is able to isolate biological materials with minimal damage but it is limited in its throughput capacity. For instance, the typical bone marrow aspirate, which is a likely target of such separations, is about 1.5 L containing about 15×106 nucleated cells/ml so that about 2.25×1010 nucleated cells need to be processed and the typical umbilical cord sample is about 100 ml containing about 5×106 nucleated cells/ml so that about 5×108 nucleated cells/ml need to be processed. But FACS has a typical processing capacity of only about 50×103 cells/second. Its use in such cell separations would lead to inordinately long separation times. To obtain practical separation times a sorting capacity of at least about 106 cells/second is desirable. On the other hand, Magnetic Activated Cell Sorting (MACS) has a fairly high capacity but its batch procedure may result in damage to the material being separated. In addition its batch procedure is labor intensive, not readily automated and in practice limited to binary sorting in which only a single target may be extracted from a sample.
Thus there is a need for a high throughput technique of isolating a biological material with minimal damage to the material being isolated that has high specificity and a sorting capacity of at least about 106 units/second. Such an approach should combine the high specificity of labeling the biological material using a recognition factor to attach the label with high capacity isolation with minimal damage.